This past week and this weekend I've finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions.

Coming next in my priorities is battery life, which should preferably be good enough to survive a week-end without a power adapter, which means about 3 days of intensive texting and light web&youtube browsing. Bad luck : every single popular smartphone OS sucks in this department.

With a little tweaking on your part, and possibly the purchase of an extended battery, you can get an Android device to last 50 hours+ of phone, SMS, e-mail, web browsing, and even light gaming. Changing the CPU governor, adding an applet to control when/how the various radios turn on, tweaking the screen brightness and auto-shutoff, etc.

My 3.7", single-core 1 GHz Xperia Pro running Android 2.3.4 gets 50 hours of usage on a regular basis. It's only when I whip out Great Little War Game for an hour or two that battery life dips into the sub-20 hour range. And I use the web browser, SSH, and e-mail throughput the day.

I take note of this I've been eyeing the Pro's "Mini" cousin as a potential next phone for some time, since it seems to combine fast enough hardware, a nice price, a small and robust form factor, and reviews mentioning a battery life of one to two days which apparently is as good as it gets for a mid-range Android device. If tweaking can get me above that, it would make the thing more interesting...

I'm debating getting the Xperia Mini Pro (2011) for my wife, as an upgrade to her ancient LG Eve. The screen and keyboard are about the same size, but the hardware/software is a *huge* upgrade. Just waiting for our "early upgrade fee" to drop below $100 to make it worthwhile. It's a nice looking piece of hardware. And there's a *very* active modder community around it (such that searching for information on "Xperia Pro" is littered with about 10:1 info on the Mini Pro).